Exordia

Exordia is a science fiction novel by Seth Dickinson. Its premise — an alien invasion of earth — is used as a lens to examine morality, violence, and how we interact with them. Set in 2013, the novel follows the invasion of earth by an alien empire of snake people called the "Exordia", searching for an alien artefact located in Kurdistan, Iraq.

The first act follows a survivor of the 1988 Anfal campaign called Anna as she discovers an alien rebel in New York City. Simultaneously, she learns how the aliens work. An artifact, called ‘Blackbird’, is then discovered, and the story transitions to the scientific and military teams that nations send to investigate it. Shortly afterwards, an alien ship arrives in Earth’s orbit and threatens to start nuking cities if humanity doesn’t turn over Blackbird.

The bulk of the story focuses on the characters around Blackbird, as they try to figure out what it does and how to prevent the aliens from taking it. There’s clear influence from Michael Crichton; the book even opens with a quote from Sphere. But what sets Exordia apart is how it uses its first contact narrative to discuss problems very relevant to the modern day, alongside hypothesizing how an alien invasion would turn out. Thematically, Exordia is a gordian knot of interconnected ideas and themes.

It is intrinsically and absolutely wrong to set aside the duties of ethics because you believe that you, you alone, are smart enough to violate them.

I really like this book, and the main reason I think it’s good is its use of nuanced and interesting characters to explore its themes. Dickinson strikes a balancing act between having the characters represent an ideology or idea, while still having them feel like people with goals and ideas. A good example is Clayton, a CIA analyst, who is utilitarian to his core. A man who chooses to “discard the narrow goggles of urgent moral outrage and open the spreadsheet of calculated action”, Clayton spends large sections of the story actively working for the aliens, and does some very bad things in the hope that he can prevent or delay the apocalypse.

In many ways Clayton represents Obama era interventionism, in that he is willing to sacrifice people to achieve positive goals, and those sacrifices frequently end up being useless. Clayton drops a bomb on an alien, accidentally killing several innocent people, only for it to not work.

In this way, he mirrors the failures of Obama’s drone program, which tried to cleanly remove terrorist leaders, but frequently caused large number of civilian casualties, leading to further anger against the US. However, Clayton’s willingness to think big picture lets him act against the aliens in a meaningful way. Although the plot ultimately rewards his pragmatic approach, it highlights his many shortcomings and draws attention to real world points where it hasn’t worked.

Exordia is a difficult book to recommend for several reasons. It’s a slow burn, a thriller where characters spend more time thinking than acting. In a similar vein as Three Body Problem or Arrival, where there’s a strong focus on how people and governments would react to an alien incursion. There’s still some excellent action and character drama, but at its core this is a book that uses sci-fi to examine morality, so I can only really recommend it to people who are interested in that.

My biggest criticism of Exordia is its introduction. The start of the book is fully focused on Anna’s experience as she learns about how the aliens work. There’s also a much stronger focus on the story’s fantastical elements; it’s all very urban fantasy.

However, after the introduction ends, the story shifts gears into hard sci-fi when the aliens invade, and the plot really gets going. This dramatic genre shift might throw off a reader, so while it’s not badly executed, I want to highlight it anyway. There are many other interesting characters that I want to cover, but if I went through all of them, I would just be explaining the whole plot. Essentially, what I want to convey is the skilled way that Dickinson, and therefore Exordia, uses characters to convey it’s themes.

Exordia’s plot doesn’t stop so that Dickinson can dump his worldview; it lets the themes develop naturally from the plot and characters. This keeps the plot engaging and the characters likeable, because they feel like people with goals rather than walking worldviews. The book is open ended in its themes and I appreciate that its positions are not prescribed to the reader.

Ultimately, the story manages to do all of this while telling a fun and compelling story about giant snakes that eat people.